UCSD SEEKING BIG PART IN BRAIN RESEARCH PROJECT

With an intensity rarely seen on campus, scientists at UC San Diego are racing to figure out the roles they might play in President Barack Obama’s proposed BRAIN Initiative. They hope to position the school to compete for tens of million of dollars in research money.

Obama announced on April 2 that he would provide $100 million in federal seed money next year for the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) project, which will focus on developing tools needed to study up to 1 million neurons simultaneously. Such tools are considered to be indispensable for exploring the inner workings of the brain.

The $100 million earmark is expected to be a down payment on a 10- to 15-year science project that could cost billions in private and public money.

Since Obama announced BRAIN, professors at the University of California San Diego have scrambled to set up meetings with people across various disciplines. They aim to establish a team approach that would highlight areas of strength on the campus, notably neuroscience, nanoengineering, computer science and psychiatry.

The university’s leaders include Ralph Greenspan, a neuroscientist who helped draft the plan that led to the BRAIN Initiative, and fellow neuroscientist Nick Spitzer.

“I’ve never, never seen excitement like this,” said Spitzer, a member of the school’s faculty for 40 years.

Planning has reached the point where UC San Diego has decided to hold a public town hall on May 17 to discuss academic partnerships and whether the university should set aside research space for a brain center. There’s a possibility that some researchers would work out of laboratory space in the Calit2 building. The university is getting ready for the first research requests related to BRAIN, which are likely to be submitted this summer.

The BRAIN Initiative also has energized San Diego County’s life-science and biotechnology communities. CONNECT, a local trade group that brings together inventors and entrepreneurs, will hold a public panel discussion on the project on May 9. The speakers include Greenspan, Anthony Lewis of Qualcomm and Terry Sejnowski of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, a member of the government’s “dream team” of BRAIN planners.

“The collaboration and openness here, and with our partners at places like Salk, is extraordinary,” Greenspan said. “I’ve been to other universities, and I can tell you that it doesn’t exist everywhere.”

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, was given that message over and over during a visit to UC San Diego on April 12. More than a dozen elite scientists representing such fields as cognitive science, nanoengineering, imaging and computer science lobbied Collins, telling him that La Jolla is more collaborative than other education centers. When they were done, some of their students picked up the lobbying.